Maximum City (38 page)

“He took the decision to go to war over Kargil,” points out Satish. “No other PM would have been able to do this.” They admire his ability to make powerful decisions, warlike decisions. “Nowadays who remembers Gandhiji?” asks Satish. But he still uses the respectful suffix.

For all their fighting on the side of the terrorists in Punjab, for all Satish’s work on behalf of the Pakistan-based bhai, both of them insist that they are not against the nation. “Patriotism and the gangwar are completely different,” says Satish. In fact, the two of them had been discussing the conflict in Kargil the previous day. They decided that if they got the chance, they would go to Kargil and fight for India. If the bhais actually tell them to do antinational work, they will quit the D-Company, maintains Satish. His greatest wish is to kill those who planned the bomb blasts. “They did wrong things.” He doesn’t want to kill the blast participants still left on the ground in Bombay—“They were pawns; they just stored the weapons in their homes”—no, not them. “I want to kill Tiger Memon. I want to kill Dawood. I want to kill Chotta Shakeel.” He is talking about the leaders of the D-Company. Satish is sitting here and announcing, in the presence of Zameer and Mickey and myself, that he wants to kill the bhai of his own gang. (Later, Zameer tells me he appreciates the fact that Satish
said out loud he wants to kill Shakeel, whom Zameer works for. “He doesn’t have one thing in his heart and another on his tongue.”)

I ask about the structure of their lives, their daily routine.

“We mostly go to sleep late,” answers Satish. “We watch TV till two. We wake up and have breakfast and do our puja by noon. Most of the time is spent on the phone. We go after flesh; mostly, college girls. We wear good clothes, have cars and mobiles. Sixty to seventy percent of the girls get seduced this way. With fifteen percent we speak English well. With the others we give money. That’s it: one hundred percent,” says Satish, totaling up. But the girls also try to make suckers out of them. He points to me. “Gentlemen like you can’t seduce girls like we can. With us, if we give her chocolates once, we want to screw her on the second date.”

Then Mickey says—and I don’t know whether he is being serious or mocking—“We believe in pure Indian principles. First the wedding night, then the children, then the home.” Maybe Mickey’s desire for doing things the Indian way comes from some heartbreak, for he adds, “We believe that a woman will always go to someone better, someone with better clothes. She will leave you for someone better.”

“A mother’s love is pure,” continues Satish, who has known so little of it. “She doesn’t think, ‘This boy failed in school, he is not my son, that one came first in his class, he
is
my son.’ A wife or a girlfriend’s love can never be that pure.” He has noticed a fact about love that he wants to call to my attention. “The day we do something very bad, we get a lot of love at home. When the police come and tell the people at home that they’re going to bring their son’s corpse home, they hug us then, they say, ‘Son, we love you.’ If I think about that love, I won’t be able to do any crime. I won’t even be able to tell a lie.” So he takes pains to avoid thinking about it.

“Mostly I am not attracted to anything,” Mickey explains. “I think about a person only as long as he is with me. When he goes a little away, I go very far away from him. Like our leader: I don’t think of him at all. I can even kill him. Even girls; I have affairs at the most for four or five days with them. Even my family: When I am away from them I don’t think too much about them.”

Why did their parents give birth to them? Satish wonders. “They must be regretting it.”

When a man touches his killer’s feet and begs for his life, saying, “Please don’t kill me. I have young children,” it is the worst argument he
can offer. Thinking the killer will let you off because you have kids assumes that you can locate a hidden source of sympathy in your killer based on something shared, something in common. But very few killers are fathers. Very few of them have had good experiences with their own fathers. So that bond between father and child, which for you and me is the most convincing argument against your death—don’t kill me because it will break that sacred bond—means nothing to them. It is a bond, in fact, that the hit men have consciously been trying to break all their lives. As far as they’re concerned, ridding your children of a father is the greatest favor they can do them.

Suddenly, Satish declares, “There is no meaning in this kind of research that you’re doing. There is no ending to this.” He repeats his advice: “If you did spiritual research instead, you might even find God.”

“Every man has the same story,” says Mickey, in agreement that my research is a waste of time.

“If four criminals die, eight more will be born,” says Satish. “There wasn’t so much crime before. Now there is only one business left: the Bullet business. All this is God’s game; we have to play it. Our existence has absolutely no meaning. Whatever our story is, it is finished.”

“We could die two hours from now,” says Mickey. But he is prepared for it. “We have seen everything there is to be seen.”

A
T THIS TIME
, Satish and Mickey are hiding out north of Dahisar. I later ask Zameer why they won’t be caught here. He explains it is because of politics among the police stations and zones. If a particular crime has been committed in a particular area, the prestige of that area’s police station is at stake in capturing the perpetrator. The other stations or zones will not cooperate willingly with them; and the original station does not like to ask the others for information on the man they are in search of. It’s the difference between food cooked at home and food asked for from someone else, explains Zameer. The police force is ridden by political factions, and no one follows these political struggles more closely than the folk of the gangwar. They know the names of all of the encounter specialists, and each has a mythology built up around him similar to the kind built up around the top hit men. At the slightest prodding, they can tell you about the exploits of Vijay Salaskar, Pradeep Sharma, Pradeep Sawant. “Sunil Mane is in good
form nowadays,” says Mickey, as if speaking about a cricket player. They speak of the police shooters with no less respect than they speak of the star gang shooters.

But the shooters of the Bombay gangs are getting restive. They are getting killed in multiple encounters. The bhais forbid them from hitting back. Satish declares, “We are ready to kill the cops. But the people on top are afraid of enmity with the police, because then the police will wipe out that company.” Instead, the bhais tell the police to kill the shooters when necessary; they inform on their own men. Satish wants to hit back at the police. “If two—four cops were hit, the encounters would stop. Right now everything—politics, the gangwar—is running on the backs of the shooters. The day the shooters feel that the people on top are not supporting them . . .” There is a kind of class consciousness developing among the shooters.

The Company tries to take care of shooters on the run like Satish. They are rotated around a series of safe houses, in good buildings around the city, and they are given mobile phones and, occasionally, cars. “I am at a place right now where I don’t have to shift every night, but the boys with me have to shift every night or every week,” says Satish. He is in a curious position. By now he has been in three companies, and they know he has no permanent allegiances. He is not working for his faith, as the Muslims in the Company profess to, or for the nation, as the Hindus in the Rajan Company claim. He is in it strictly for the gold. At the moment, he needs to raise money for the wedding of a friend’s sister; the friend had been jailed after a botched job. He has no love for Rajan or for Dawood. “There is no loyalty,” he says. “There is no trust.”

I remember what Kamal had told me about the dal badlus, the men who change loyalty from one gang to another. This usually happens after a disagreement with the bhai. It could happen emotionally, “such as when the bhai shoots your brother.” When he sends out feelers to the rival gang that he wants to change parties, the second bhai will tell him, “Give us a gift,” and the dal badlu will shoot a member of the first gang, perhaps the leader, as an offering. But he is always mistrusted by the gang he goes to; he is always the first to be given up to the police. “Such a man is killed after he’s used.”

Satish, all of twenty-five years old, can never leave the gangwar. “Now there is no use in getting out. Now there are opposite people”—the many
enemies he has made in the opposition. He remembers that the first man he had murdered, the Muslim blasts’ suspect, had “improved.” He had left the gangwar. “He had a wife, two kids. He got traced.” Satish often thinks about his own death. “I have seen so many deaths. When I am killed I will die quickly, there will be no trouble. I want only this: Of the people who kill me, I want one of them to die by my hand.”

Before he goes out on a job, Satish blesses himself ceremoniously. “I give myself blessings. I don’t take anybody else’s blessing. For all good and evil, I give myself blessings, because I alone am responsible for everything in this world. I don’t believe in good or evil; I believe in karma.” Then, turning to me, Satish asks, “Do you believe in sin and virtue?”

I say that I do.

“Only weak persons believe in sin and virtue. My father works a lot, suffers in the trains. Now there is me. I don’t work a lot. I sit, I get a phone call, I go and put a bullet in someone and get a lakh of rupees. It is no big thing for me, but my father won’t be able to do that work. So he will give his fear a name: sin. He will call it principles or whatever.”

He tells me a story about his cousin, a civil engineer. He was much loved at home and now earns several thousand rupees a month working for a builder. “I never got that pampering at home. I earn a lot of money. Who is more successful, I can’t say. His progress is slow and steady, mine is all at once, but there is no use.” He envies his cousin, envies him his respectability—the families must be comparing the two of them constantly—but has a measure of contempt for him. “He would never have thought of anything outside of his life.” One day, when they were both children, they had a big fight. The cousin was living next to an automobile factory that made the omnipresent little Fiat cars. Satish and his cousin were talking about cars, as little boys do. Satish was speaking about the fancy cars he had heard about: Toyota, Mercedes. He told his cousin that the Mercedes was the most expensive car in the world. His cousin, seeing the Fiats roll out every day next to his house, insisted that the Fiat was the most expensive car in the world. “I felt like breaking his head,” recalls Satish. “He is, bhenchod, a frog in a well.”

He asks me about my education. I tell him I have a master’s degree. “I think I also have a master’s degree,” he says. “Because I am in this line I think very fast. My confidence level has been raised; it is flying. If you have to shoot a man standing in the midst of ten people, you need confidence. If
I apply myself to math or science or business I will get very good results because of my confidence. I am at an advanced stage of confidence.” Satish thinks that if he were to go into business in Bombay, he would do well there too. “You know why? Nobody will be able to extort me. In Bombay, to be a capable businessman, you have to be in touch with the underworld.”

But Satish’s mind has not been at ease for a while now. He has not been able to meditate. He used to be able to meditate for hours at a time. Bombay makes him uneasy. “In Bombay there is something in the air. In Bombay you see death all the time.” Even on the trains. “Have you traveled on the Virar train? Just traveling on it will make you strong. I feel more tension hanging from the Virar train than from a shooting.”

A few days ago he had been on one of those trains. It was packed in the way only a Bombay train can be, and Satish was crushed against a Gujarati man standing with his wife and children and brother. Satish asked him politely to move a little, give him a little space. The Gujarati got agitated. “Don’t be a wiseass!” he shouted at Satish. His brother grabbed Satish’s neck, and Satish kicked out and hit the man’s son by mistake. He felt bad about hitting the little boy. The Gujarati was showing off in front of his wife and children and brother, cursing the lone Maharashtrian man. He shook his umbrella at Satish, intending to swat him with it. Satish had one hand on his gun. “I asked myself, should I, shouldn’t I?” He appealed to the man’s wife: “Aunty, please make him understand.” The Gujarati raised his umbrella; Satish felt his gun. But what if the man told the crowd that Satish had touched his wife? The crowd could do anything to him. So he let his challenge go and took a backward leap off the train. “But I will meet him again, I’m sure of it.” He is laughing as he mimes the Gujarati waving his umbrella, not knowing how close he was to death. A gangster must not be offended, however inconsequentially. A slight which for normal people would be merely annoying, soon forgotten, is for someone like Satish a huge ego wound. That sense of being slighted can lead to homicide. There is no proportionality to his response. A hit man’s character is defined above all by narcissism, that complex mix of egotism and self-hatred.

There is something in the Bombay air that agitates him, Satish repeats. “My mind has not been stable for a while. Something is always going on, even in sleep.” When he eats, he feels very hot all over, and thinks, Ma ki chud, I want to kill someone. Satish turns to me. He asks, “Have you ever fired a gun?”

“No.”

“Do you have a desire to?”

I smile.

“I liked your partner’s answer.” Satish turns to Mickey and tells him what Vikram had said at our last meeting. “A cat was dying in the middle of the road. When I asked him what should be done with the cat, he answered that if he had some instrument he would kill it with his hands. It appeared to me a very straightforward answer.” But I am different. “You are not a gentleman!” Satish says. “You are worse than criminals.”

“Why?”

“The more educated you are, the more criminal you are. You become heartless, self-centered. You use the power of your money to give people trouble.”